The Iron Lady

The Clinton campaign returns from the dead, again.

Hillary’s strength has been in refining the art of attack.Credit RICHARD THOMPSON

To watch Hillary Clinton during the final two weeks of the Ohio and Texas primary campaigns, as she defiantly ignored the pronouncements of her political demise and pounded away at her opponent in one more interview, at one more rally, was to bring to mind Jason or Freddy Krueger or the sitting governor of California, those Hollywood cyborgs and zombies who, despite bullets and stakes and explosions, will not under any circumstances be vanquished. Clinton’s public performances were marked by an eerily unflappable persistence as she executed an ungentle two-pronged attack: raising doubts about the readiness of her young opponent, Senator Barack Obama, to be Commander-in-Chief and challenging the depth of his commitment to the bread-and-butter concerns of the middle class. On February 25th, during a foreign-policy speech at George Washington University, she surrounded herself with six military men, including General Wesley Clark, himself a former Presidential candidate, and Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who forthrightly investigated the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, to the despair of the Pentagon leadership. Clinton attacked Obama from both the right (he would naïvely grant a Presidential audience to the world’s dictators) and the left (he would unilaterally attack terrorist enclaves in Pakistan). The charges might have been, at best, a distortion of Obama’s positions, but they were surely meant to paint him as unschooled and unseasoned––Barack the Unready.

Part of the way through her fusillade, Clinton broke into a spasm of coughing––much of the campaign entourage of aides and press had been battered with the flu and other transmittable ailments––and then, briefly, she lost her voice. The audience fell silent. For a dramatic moment, it was unclear if she could continue. But Clinton righted herself and struggled through some lines about Darfur without losing her place. It was as if she had managed to suppress the coughing through sheer will. An aide slipped in from the side and handed her a cough drop, which she discreetly popped into her mouth during a burst of applause.

Two days later, aboard Clinton’s chartered campaign plane (she took off in a blizzard from Cleveland and was on to Columbus), she spoke in the aisle, while reporters, some pinned against tray tables by overeager cameramen who had leaped over several seats to get a good angle, crushed in around her with their recorders. The plane began its descent, careering toward the runway. Oblivious of airline regulations, Clinton continued ticking off her anti-Obama lines: “What I feel is happening is that people are turning toward the big questions that they should have to answer in this campaign. You know, who can be the best Commander-in-Chief, who do you want in the White House answering the phone at 3 A.M.?” (The line was straight from a new Clinton television spot, in which a telephone is heard ringing, ominously, at three in the morning—a spot that belonged to a half-century tradition of scare ads involving red telephones and mushroom clouds.) The landing gear dropped, but Clinton was on to the subject of the subprime-lending crisis and home foreclosures. “Many of you are homeowners. Home values in America have dropped one-point-six trillion dollars in the last year. So everybody’s wealth is disintegrating.”

The runway came into view. A voice on the intercom demanded that passengers sit down and fasten their seat belts. Clinton, though, continued standing and talking calmly about why she was staying in the contest. “We’re now raising on average a million dollars a day on the Internet. People have just been, you know, really rallying to my candidacy.” Reporters glanced nervously out the window, but never for an instant did Clinton turn away from the cameras, lose her train of thought, or allow the imminent landing to interrupt the full ventilation of her talking points. Seconds before touchdown, an aide steered Hillary Clinton back to her seat.

Unlike Hubert Humphrey, Al Smith, or even her husband, Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail has never been able to project the image of the happy warrior. There is now, and has always been, a certain joylessness in her bearing. She has been trying to make discipline a selling point since her first “listening tour” of New York State, in the months before she ran for the United States Senate—a device designed to portray tireless commitment to voters suspicious of her carpetbagging and celebrity. After landing in Columbus, the campaign entourage headed by motorcade to Zanesville, a town of about twenty-five thousand, sixty miles away, for what was billed as an economic “summit.” The ninety-minute conversation among Clinton and fourteen politicians and business and labor leaders, and Ohioans with hard-luck stories, had all the drama of a Senate committee hearing. Some no doubt found the discussion riveting, but at one point the former Ohio senator and Mercury astronaut John Glenn, a panelist, was either very deep in thought about college loans, or fast asleep. Scores of audience members were similarly benumbed and fled the event before it was over. But Clinton seemed confident about the electoral power of relentless policy tedium. It was as if the sheer display of iron-pantsed discussion would further underscore her insistent theme: the hollowness of Obama’s charisma. When one speaker offered encomiums to Clinton rather than economic prescriptions, she gently reprimanded her, saying, “We’re going to put a moratorium on compliments.” Then, with the bonhomie of a high-school health teacher, she turned the conversation back toward government programs to help people “quit smoking, to get more exercise, to eat right, to take their vitamins.”

Endurance is the unseen requirement of a successful candidate. Even round-the-clock cable coverage does not quite convey the drumming repetition of a campaign, and Clinton, for all her weaknesses, is a master of this punishing, incessant rhythm. Unlike Obama, who can seem recessive when he tires, she is intent on masking the fatigue. Even on primary day, Clinton kept at it. She spent the morning in a Houston studio, taking part in twenty television interviews reaching every major market in Texas and Ohio. Clinton was methodical. In every Texas interview, as if for the first time, she patiently mentioned her military endorsements and the work that she did thirty-six years ago in George McGovern’s Presidential campaign, registering Latino voters in south Texas. (This last seemed ironic, considering that the Clinton campaign wants to portray Obama as a twenty-first-century McGovern––too soft, too naïve, and destined to lose in November.) In every Ohio interview, she raised what, in the last week of the campaign, had become a potent anti-Obama issue: the discrepancy between his public criticisms of the North American Free Trade Agreement and an Obama adviser’s alleged assurances to the Canadian government that the candidate’s sharp rhetoric was merely primary-season politics. “Senator Obama came to Ohio and said one thing about NAFTA, and then had a foreign government told something else,” she told a Dayton radio station. Her message control was interrupted only when another prolonged coughing fit forced her to take a break during a chat with a Corpus Christi station. Her break did not last long.

Later that morning, the campaign moved to the parking lot at the J. P. Henderson Elementary School, a polling place in a heavily Hispanic corner of southeast Houston that had been transformed into a tiny set. Salsa music filled the air, about a dozen smiling Latino children were brought in, and Clinton’s motorcade soon rumbled toward the school. Accompanying the candidate was a somewhat eclectic entourage: the actor Ted Danson, who wore an Irish tweed hat; his wife, the actress Mary Steenburgen, an Arkansan and longtime supporter of Bill and Hillary Clinton; Clinton’s soignée aide-de-camp, Huma Abedin, who was recently profiled in Vogue and currently was wearing a bright-orange sweater and black boots that shimmered in the sunlight; and Anthony Weiner, the wiry Brooklyn congressman and aspiring mayor of New York. Clinton’s eyes widened at the sight of the children, and with a cue from a staffer they began to chant, “Hill-ar-ee! Hill-are-ee!” Clinton bent and talked to a little girl in a black cowboy hat. The photographers swooped in for the picture of the day.

The press corps following Clinton had grown in recent days, but not for reasons that pleased the campaign. Like Vatican reporters who travelled with John Paul II less to hear his homilies than to report the details of his senescence, these reporters came, at first, for the political deathwatch. Bill Clinton himself had told Texas voters that if Texas and Ohio did not come through for Hillary, the campaign was probably finished. At the time, this seemed like further evidence that the former President had lost his political ear, that he had become more a walking minefield than an asset to his wife. But by primary day, as Hillary Clinton’s resolve to stay in the race became clear, the mood in the media mob had shifted. “We have come to bury Hillary, but we may end up praising her,” Tom Baldwin, of the London Times, said. And Mark Penn, Clinton’s portly and unloved chief strategist, told me, speaking of Obama, “We broke his momentum completely. That’s why, when I went to sleep Monday, I could say every single poll had moved in one direction—towards us.”

By this point, Clinton had begun to see that all the work aimed at derailing Obama had paid off. As the Latino children continued their chant, she smiled and said, “I feel really good about today.”

Later that night, at Clinton’s victory party in Columbus (she won the Ohio primary with fifty-four per cent of the vote), Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the campaign and an unflaggingly high-spirited supporter of both Clintons, indulged in an impromptu we-told-you-so session. He taunted reporters for their eagerness to write off Clinton’s prospects. “We came back in New Hampshire, Nevada, Super Tuesday,” he said. “And we’re doing it again tonight.” After a long string of defeats for the Clinton forces, this was her moment of triumph. Just after MSNBC put a winning check mark next to Clinton’s picture, projecting her victory in Ohio, a young female volunteer did a joyous dance with friends. “Hell yeah, baby!” she shouted. “Eat it, Barack! This is a woman’s world!”

McAuliffe’s agitated recap of the campaign left out some unignorable facts. He ignored that Super Tuesday, on February 5th, had widely been considered a draw. (Obama won thirteen states, Clinton won nine, and Obama emerged with a lead of more than a dozen delegates.) Nor did he mention that before March 4th Obama had won eleven straight contests—twelve counting Vermont, which he had won a few hours earlier. (Clinton was also about to win in Texas, by a margin of 51–47.) But all of these results had presented the Clinton campaign with an arithmetical dilemma. In the remaining dozen primary contests, which include the March 8th Wyoming caucus and stretch to the South Dakota primary, on June 3rd, Clinton needs to win by huge margins in order to overcome the more than hundred-delegate lead that Obama still enjoyed after March 4th. By that calculation, Clinton could reach the number of delegates needed to secure the nomination only by appealing to the so-called superdelegates—elected and Party officials who aren’t bound by actual voting in the primaries and caucuses. Would it be acceptable, I asked McAuliffe, for the superdelegates to overturn the results of the popular vote?

“You keep trying to contend the nomination is over tonight!” McAuliffe replied loudly and happily, pointing and waving his arms. “I’m telling you we have twelve states to go. Don’t tell me about the popular vote. You call me in June and then talk to me about it. We don’t know where we’re going to be. We have a lot of states. I don’t want you disenfranchising all these great states coming up. . . . Why don’t you like these people?”

The next day, a Clinton adviser was more candid about what lies ahead. “Inside the campaign, people are not idiots,” she told me. “Everyone can do the math. It isn’t like the Obama campaign has some special abacus. We can do these calculations, too. Everyone recognizes how steep this hill is. But you gotta keep your game face on.”

For Clinton, it will be vital in the weeks ahead to maintain the public perception that she can still win. If the Obama campaign’s strength has been its grassroots organization—he built his delegate lead by winning in far-flung caucus states that Clinton ignored—the Clinton campaign’s strength has been in refining the art of attack. Its war room is staffed by a team of men and women who consider themselves heirs to the celebrity operatives of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign—in particular, James Carville, Clinton’s campaign manager, and George Stephanopoulos, his communications director. Until recently, Hillary Clinton’s communications team, led by Howard Wolfson, a pugnacious operative who has been with Clinton since her first Senate campaign, and the equally combative Phil Singer, a former aide to Senator Charles Schumer, was not always impressive. Through January and much of February, the campaign never quite settled an internal debate about how aggressively to attack Obama. In public, Hillary shifted from deferential (“I am honored to be here with Barack Obama”) to confrontational (“Shame on you, Barack Obama!”). In debates, she seemed almost to experiment with attack lines, few of which seemed spontaneous, and Obama was deft at arguing that the attacks on him were examples of “old politics.” Meanwhile, the press corps seemed uninterested in any sustained anti-Obama focus, writing more about the history he was making rather than the political corners he might be cutting.

By early February, Clinton’s campaign seemed to be flailing. On one day, she accused Obama of plagiarizing part of a speech (actually a few lines borrowed at the suggestion of an Obama friend, the governor of Massachusetts), on another of reneging on a campaign-finance pledge (which would have applied only to the general election). In a series of debates (twenty in all, for anyone counting), Clinton kept accusing Obama of advocating a health-care plan—not very different from hers—that she insisted failed to insure fifteen million Americans. None of these arguments slowed Obama’s victory streak, which started on February 9th with wins in Louisiana, Nebraska, Washington, and the Virgin Islands.

The Clinton campaign finally succeeded in tripping up Obama as reporters began to raise the questions put to them in daily conferences by the war-room managers: Why, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on European Affairs, had Obama never held a hearing about NATO’s role in Afghanistan? And, come to think of it, what was the full nature of Obama’s relationship with Tony Rezko, his onetime fund-raiser and friend, who happened to be on trial in Chicago for extortion, money laundering, and fraud? There was also that curious business with the Canadians. Was it true that Obama’s top economic-policy adviser, Austan Goolsbee, had told someone at the Canadian consulate that Obama was not entirely serious about renegotiating NAFTA? The Clinton campaign acted utterly shocked by this possible revelation. (Never mind that in an interview last year Clinton told me that the problem with NAFTA was “not necessarily the framework” but “the way that it was implemented and enforced.”)

The attacks were working. Last week, Penn told me, “If you look at the Gallup tracking poll, we moved even after just a few days of opening a couple of basic questions on him. So it really shows that he’s much weaker as a potential nominee.” (The poll in question showed Obama leading nationally 50–42 on the Saturday before primary day, and the race tied, 45–45, three days later.)

The newfound strength of Clinton’s war room is vital for her going forward. Her campaign realizes that if it is unable to overcome Obama’s lead in pledged delegates, there may be only one other path to victory: to make the case to superdelegates—and the Party establishment—that Obama could not defeat John McCain in the general election, and that, therefore, the will of the voters should not be binding. Mark Penn has been trying to make that argument for weeks, but few paid attention while Obama was winning. (How could the Illinois senator be unelectable if he was on his way to being elected?) But people are listening now, despite polls consistently showing that Obama does better than Clinton in a head-to-head race with McCain.

Penn, regardless of the success of his tactics, has become a lonely figure in the Clinton campaign. “Mark Penn does not have many friends,” one Clinton adviser told me when I asked which camp in the notoriously balkanized Clinton campaign he represented. But Penn has the two friends that matter: Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have relied on his instincts and wisdom since he was brought into the White House with Dick Morris after the Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, took control of Congress in the 1994 midterm election. Hillary Clinton wrote in her autobiography that the weeks after that defeat were “among the most difficult of my White House years” and she “wondered how much I was to blame for the debacle: whether we had lost the election over health care.” But with help from Morris and his protégé, Mark Penn, President Clinton saw his approval ratings rebound, and by the fall of 1996, after Morris resigned in the wake of his own sex—or, to be precise, toe-sucking—scandal, Penn had taken charge of Clinton’s successful reëlection campaign. In 1998, Bill Clinton’s affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky was disclosed, and by that time Penn’s place in the Clinton circle of friends, enablers, and strategists was fixed. He gave advice to the President throughout his impeachment ordeal and to Mrs. Clinton as she recovered from public humiliation. Penn served as the chief strategist for her successful 2000 and 2006 Senate campaigns. More than any other senior adviser, Penn has guided both Clintons through their most treacherous political troubles––and has encouraged Hillary Clinton’s almost unnerving survival instincts.

Penn’s poll-defying arguments about Obama’s electability against McCain will be pressed ever more forcefully as both campaigns move to the dénouement of the primary season. From Penn’s standpoint, Obama’s freshness is his greatest vulnerability. “The G.O.P. attack machine redefines the Democratic candidate,” Penn said recently. “It’s formidable. It commands a vast media network. And it has been able to skew the perceptions even of such distinguished public servants and well-respected Democrats as Al Gore and John Kerry, creating impressions of them very quickly that were out of step with reality.” Hillary Clinton, he went on, “has withstood the full brunt of this kind of attack and will be able to neutralize what is likely to happen, particularly with the nominee who is not as well known through public life.”

Clinton is stressing in all her appearances—another point that Penn sees as essential—that Obama will appear distinctly weaker on national-security questions in relation to McCain. (This infuriates Obama’s supporters—after all, he alone among the surviving candidates opposed the invasion of Iraq.) The Clinton campaign will also press the claim that Obama will not be able to withstand heightened scrutiny of his domestic-policy views. The implication is that Obama is unacceptably liberal, while Clinton, despite the similarity of her positions and voting record, is not. “How much do Independent voters really know about Barack Obama, his voting record, and his past positions?” Penn asked recently. “Certainly less than Democrats know. In a general election the Republicans would spring into action, and quickly, if he were the nominee, roll out his full record. And the kind of Independent support that you see in places like Idaho would consequently evaporate.”

Penn pushed this idea last week when he told me, “People want to have a nominee that’s going to win. So a lot of the things they accepted initially may not hold up. Independent and Republican support is diminishing as they find out he’s the most liberal Democratic senator”—a reference to recent rankings by the National Journal. “As they get more of a sense that he’s not ready to be Commander-in-Chief, a lot of Independents who were supporting him are disappearing.”

This electability argument—that Obama can be easily caricatured, that he’s weak on national security, that he’s too liberal—is not so very different from the Republican case against Obama, although the charges might be more damaging coming from a member of one’s own party, especially in a bruising campaign that may last until the Convention this August in Denver. It is tempting to say that the Clinton campaign’s plan is to burn the village in order to save it—that Hillary Clinton believes that Democrats, hypnotized by Obama, are making a historic mistake from which only she can rescue them. And it is tempting to add that this means the political destruction of the man who is still most likely to be the Democratic nominee.

Clinton’s victories and her rhetorical tactics have challenged Obama’s principled refusal to play the rough-and-ready game which he brands “old politics.” Her disingenuous remark on “60 Minutes” that Obama was not a Muslim “as far as I know” was especially galling. One foreign-policy adviser, the professor and author Samantha Power, betrayed a taste of the Obama campaign’s anger at Clinton when she told The Scotsman that Clinton was “a monster. . . . The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.” (Power, who also writes for The New Yorker, apologized and resigned from the campaign last Friday.)

But perhaps this prospect of a gruelling endgame is not as destructive as it sounds. The attacks on Obama, and Obama’s counterattacks on Clinton, have been mild compared to some heard in recent elections. (Before the Iowa caucuses in 2004, a Democratic group ran an advertisement that showed an image of Osama bin Laden with a voice-over saying, “Howard Dean just cannot compete with George Bush on foreign policy.” Robert Gibbs, the spokesperson for the group, is now Obama’s communications director.) At the end of last week, Obama was accusing Clinton of hiding her finances, and the Clinton campaign was comparing Obama’s accusations to those of Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who investigated Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal, and whose very name, among Clintonites, is synonymous with villainy.

There are two unsettled questions about Obama that a final, bitter counter-offensive from Clinton may help answer: Does Obama have the toughness required to beat John McCain, and, more important, to serve as President? And can Obama attract some of the key swing groups—especially white working-class Democrats and Latinos—who have been drawn to Clinton but are open to voting for McCain? The purpose of primaries, after all, is to answer such questions.

Clinton may be criticized for staying too long in the race and for attacking Obama in ways that his supporters will consider nefarious and desperate. But no one is entitled to a Presidential nomination. As ugly as it looks now—and as ugly as it is likely to become—if Barack Obama becomes the Democrats’ nominee, he may thank Hillary Clinton for making him a better candidate. ♦

Ryan Lizza is the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, and also an on-air contributor for CNN.